Neil Blair, partner at the Christopher Little Agency (CLA) which represents Rowling, said the agency was "currently considering all the options and opportunities that this evolving space provides". The agency was "actively" looking, whereas previously it had just been "monitoring the developing area", he said.

Richard Charkin, executive director of Rowling's print publisher Bloomsbury, declined to comment on whether Bloomsbury was in discussions with the author on e-book plans, saying: "That's between us and CLA."

Rowling writes on her website, "You won't be hearing from me often I am afraid, as pen and paper is my priority at the moment."

The movies nominated for the screenplay award are In the Loop (Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci & Tony Roche), District 9 (Neill Blomkamp & Terri Tatchell), Precious: Based On The Novel Push By Sapphire (Geoffrey Fletcher), An Education (Nick Hornby) and Up In The Air (Jason Reitman & Sheldon Turner).

Jacobs' family members filed a lawsuit last June, claiming Rowling's 2000 book Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire steals segments of the writer's novel The Adventures of Willy the Wizard - No 1 Livid Land. Rowling was named as a defendant in the lawsuit on Wednesday after the trustee of Jacobs' estate, Paul Allen, realised the time limit to sue the writer had not run out.

But Rowling has moved quickly to slam the accusation, insisting she has never even read Jacobs' book and will be applying to have the claim dismissed immediately. In a statement, she says: "The fact is I had never heard of the author or the book before the first accusation by those connected to the author's estate in 2004; I have certainly never read the book.

"The claims that are made are not only unfounded but absurd and I am disappointed that I, and my U.K. publisher Bloomsbury, are put in a position to have to defend ourselves. We will be applying to the court immediately for a ruling that the claim is without merit and should therefore be dismissed without delay."

I am told that people have been twittering on my behalf, so I thought a brief visit was in order just to prevent any more confusion!

However, I should flag up now that although I could twitter endlessly, I'm afraid you won't be hearing from me very often.......... as pen and paper is my priority at the moment

It [the lawsuit] added that the plot of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire copied elements of the plot of Willy the Wizard, including a wizard contest, and that the Potter series borrowed the idea of wizards traveling on trains.

"Both Willy and Harry are required to work out the exact nature of the main task of the contest which they both achieve in a bathroom assisted by clues from helpers, in order to discover how to rescue human hostages imprisoned by a community of half-human, half-animal fantasy creatures," the estate statement said. "It is alleged that all of these are concepts first created by Adrian Jacobs in Willy the Wizard, some 10 years before J.K. Rowling first published any of the Harry Potter novels and 13 years before Goblet of Fire was published."

According to the statement, Jacobs had sought the services of literary agent Christopher Little who later became Rowling's agent. Jacobs died "penniless" in a London hospice in 1997, it said. In its response, Bloomsbury said Rowling "had never heard of Adrian Jacobs nor seen, read or heard of his book Willy the Wizard until this claim was first made in 2004, almost seven years after the publication of the first book in the highly publicized Harry Potter series. "Willy the Wizard is a very insubstantial booklet running to 36 pages which had very limited distribution. The central character of Willy the Wizard is not a young wizard and the book does not revolve around a wizard school."

President Nicolas Sarkozy bestowed the title of knight in the Legion of Honor on Rowling, who used her acceptance speech to apologize for the quality of her French accent and for having given one of the villains in her series a French name. "I cannot say that I think that I truly deserve it, but the Legion of Honor has a particular and personal meaning," she said in a ceremony in an ornate presidential palace ballroom.

One of her great-grandfathers, who was French, had received it in 1924 for his courage in the Battle of Verdun during the First World War, she said. Rowling also thanked her readers in France "for not having held a grudge against me for having given a French name to my evil character" in the series — Lord Voldemort.

"I can assure you that no anti-French feeling was at the origin of this choice," she said. "As a Francophile, I have always been proud of my French blood. But I needed a name that evokes both power and exoticism." "Voldemort himself is 100-percent English," Rowling said in French, pleading with the audience that included young French teens to forgive her accent. She noted that she had once taught French in Scotland.

Unlike the profits from the novels in the core Harry Potter series, the proceeds from Beedle the Bard are going to an east European children's charity chaired by Rowling, called the Children's High Level Group. Based on a European commission-backed organisation of the same name run by MEP Emma Nicholson to coordinate efforts to rehome 100,000 Romanian children kept in appalling conditions in state institutions, the charity focuses on rebuilding children's services in five east European countries.

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Rowling said she hoped the new book would "not only be a welcome present to Harry Potter fans, but an opportunity to give these abandoned children a voice. It will encourage young people across the world to think about those who are less fortunate, and help change many young lives for the better."

About 20 local school children, selected by ballot, will be invited to attend the special charity launch at which Rowling will read extracts from the book, published by The Children's High Level Group (CHLG), the charity co-founded by Rowling and Emma Nicholson MEP, in collaboration with Bloomsbury, Scholastic and Amazon.

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There will be three editions of The Tales of Beedle the Bard in the English language – mass market versions printed and distributed by Bloomsbury in the UK and Scholastic in the US, and a run of up to 100,000 collector's edition copies printed and distributed by Amazon. To date, 23 foreign language publications are confirmed.

The $300m JK Rowling pulled in over the last year will make sickening reading for the majority of authors who are struggling to earn a living.

Rowling made $571 a minute between June 1 2007 and June 1 2008, according to Forbes's ranking of the world's best paid authors, thanks to last July's publication of the final novel detailing the adventures of her boy wizard, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The book has sold around 44m copies since publication, including 15m in its first 24 hours on sale, said Forbes.

Labour party supporter Rowling made a whopping six times more than second best paid author James Patterson, whose not-so-paltry $50m was drummed up through a combination of thrillers, romance and children's books. Patterson is now publishing up to eight books a year thanks to an army of "writing partners", and is also developing a computer game of his Women's Murder Club series.

Steve Vander Ark's Harry Potter Lexicon was yesterday found by a federal judge in New York to violate JK Rowling's copyright; Rowling had previously described the book as "wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work". Of the ban, Vander Ark said: "It obviously was a blow but I'm looking forwards, moving on with other projects. I bear no ill will whatsoever to Ms Rowling."

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"Obviously I do a lot of research on Harry Potter," he said this morning. "And the more research I did the more I realised that the places in the books were places in the world, particularly those in the west country, because she went to university in Exeter."

The independent publisher describes the resulting book as an "extraordinary travel book" which "evokes the myths and magic of Harry Potter". Methuen managing director Peter Tummons said that at present, each chapter includes a "few words" taken from the Harry Potter books themselves. "We've asked for approval but I guess in the end we will probably delete them because it may not come, or be denied." The book is illustrated with Vander Ark's own photos.

U.S. District Judge Robert P. Patterson said Ms. Rowling had proven that Steven Vander Ark's "Harry Potter Lexicon" would cause her irreparable harm as a writer. He permanently blocked publication of the reference guide and awarded Rowling and Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. $6,750 in statutory damages.

Ms. Rowling and Warner Bros., maker of the Harry Potter films and owner of intellectual property rights to the Potter books and movies, sued Michigan-based RDR Books last year to stop publication of material from the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site. Mr. Vander Ark, a former school librarian, runs the site, which is a guide to the seven Potter books and includes detailed descriptions of characters, creatures, spells and potions.

The small publisher was not contesting that the lexicon infringes upon Rowling's copyright but argued that it was a fair use allowable by law for reference books. In his ruling, Patterson noted that reference materials are generally useful to the public but that in this case, Mr. Vander Ark went too far. "While the lexicon, in its current state, is not a fair use of the Harry Potter works, reference works that share the lexicon's purpose of aiding readers of literature generally should be encouraged rather than stifled," he said. He added that he ruled in Ms. Rowling's favor because the "Lexicon appropriates too much of Rowling's creative work for its purposes as a reference guide."

Rowling complained about articles in the Daily Mirror, Daily Record and the Scottish Mail on Sunday that reported that she had bought a property close to the estate she already owns in Perthshire. The Scottish Mail on Sunday article, headlined "JK's Rowling hills", was accompanied by pictures showing long-distance views of the author's home, the neighbouring property that she had recently bought and the surrounding countryside.

Rowling, through her solicitors Schillings, said that the articles, published in October last year, invaded her privacy by identifying the location of her Perthshire home. She complained that there had been a breach of clause 3 of the PCC code of practice. In 2005 the PCC upheld a complaint from Rowling after the Daily Mirror published information that could identify the address of her London home.

However, in this case the PCC, which has stated that identifying the location of celebrities' homes may attract stalkers, found that the articles did not name the road the property was on, nor its location in relation to the nearest town.

Rowling, who was given an honorary doctor of letters degree, urged the Harvard grads to use their influence and status to speak out on behalf of the powerless. "We do not need magic to transform our world," she said. "We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already; we have the power to imagine better."

Imagination gives one the ability to empathize with others, she said. "Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation," Rowling said. "In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity; it is the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared." Rowling described a low point seven years after graduating from college, when she was a poor single mother.

"The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are ever after secure in your ability to survive," Rowling said. "You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity." She called such knowledge "a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned."

An 800-word Harry Potter prequel is one of 13 card-sized works to be sold at a charity auction in the British capital. Waterstone's Booksellers Ltd. says the cream-colored A5 papers — each slightly bigger than a postcard — were distributed to 13 authors and illustrators, including the boy wizard's creator J.K. Rowling, Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, novelist Margaret Atwood and playwright Tom Stoppard.

Rowling used both sides of her card to hand-write a prequel to her seven-book Harry Potter saga, while Lessing penned a story about the power of reading. Stoppard wrote a short mystery and Atwood was due to fill out her card remotely using a robotic arm controlled by computer linkup. Other cards were completed by children's author Michael Rosen, illustrator Axel Scheffler, graphic novelist Neil Gaiman, Lisa Appignanesi, Richard Ford, Lauren Child, Irvine Welsh, Sebastian Faulks and Nick Hornby, who plastered his card with a collage.

The cards will go on sale at the "What's Your Story?" auction at Waterstone's flagship store in central London on June 10. The proceeds are to go to English PEN, the writers' association, and the British charity Dyslexia Action. Copies of the cards will be collated into a book to be made available at the bookstore and online in August.

A British court ruling in favour of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has set the stage for a trial on whether the publication of covert photos taken of her young son violates his privacy. The Court of Appeal says the children of famous parents have the same right to expect privacy as the children of parents who are not well known.

Today's ruling sets aside an earlier finding in favour of Express Newspapers and Big Picture, an agency that took the photos with a long telephoto lens. Rowling and her husband Dr. Neil Murray took the case to court on behalf of their son David, who is now five.